


A Sleepless Night

by afteriwake



Series: And Now I'm Learning You [22]
Category: Doctor Who, Sherlock (TV), Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-04
Updated: 2014-10-04
Packaged: 2018-02-19 21:37:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,952
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2403773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/afteriwake/pseuds/afteriwake
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The revelations when the Doctor looked at his memories have left Khan with more sleepless nights than he would like, and one night Molly wakes up because of that. She asks him about the thoughts keeping him awake and while he doesn't get any real answers from their discussion he does end up with a better idea of just what might be going on.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Sleepless Night

**Author's Note:**

> And this is the last one for now. Once again, I apologize for posting so many at once but I got really inspired for this series for some reason. I hope you enjoyed them all.

Khan lay in bed, wide awake. He didn't sleep that much before the troubling revelations, and he'd found sleep even harder to come by in the week since he found out the truth of just how he and Carlton were connected. He hadn't been that surprised that he was a clone. He'd accepted he was genetically engineered very early on in life, and there really wasn't much of a difference between being cloned and being born genetically modified in his mind. And he supposed he could understand why someone would agree to take only one child and not two. But that was where he got frustrated. Was the only reason he was chosen to go back was because Carlton had been considered a nonviable clone? What might have happened if he had actually grown up here, with Sherlock's family? Would he have gone mad like Carlton did, or would it have been different? Those were just some of the questions that had been keeping him awake at night.

He had been lying on his back, with his arms behind his head. Molly was curled up on her side facing him, her arm across his chest in a reverse of how they usually slept. He turned his head to look at her and saw she was starting to wake up. It was much earlier than she usually woke up, and after a moment he moved his arms and pulled her closer. “Go back to sleep, Molly,” he said quietly.

“You're thinking too loudly,” she murmured sleepily, punctuating it with a yawn.

Even with the dour thoughts he was thinking that statement brought a small smile to his face. “How can I be thinking too loudly?” he asked in an amused tone.

She opened her eyes and then moved slightly so she could put her head on his bare chest. “I don't know if I can explain it. I guess I just know that you have a lot on your mind and you're not sleeping. And usually when you wake up before I do I can still sleep. It's been harder for the last week.” 

He lifted his hand up and began to stroke her hair back. She'd spent quite a long time sleeping next to him, he realized. The first night they had shared a bed had been at the end of October 2012, though he had gone to sleep and woken up while Molly was still asleep. It wasn't until the middle of November that they had actually started sleeping next to each other as opposed to simply sharing a bed. So from the first night to now it had been about a year and seven months that she had been sharing a bed with him at night. Now that he actually thought about it, he realized that was quite a bit of time that they had been romantically involved. Even though they had actually celebrated an anniversary the year before he hadn't realized it was now closer to two years that they had been together than it was one. It was things like that that surprised him. But right now he wanted her to go back to sleep. She needed the rest. “I promise I'll think more softly, then,” he said.

“I'd appreciate it,” she said with another yawn, moving her arm down to his waist. “Everything the Doctor said. It bothers you a lot.”

“Yes, it does,” he said with a nod, not remotely surprised she hadn't phrased it as a question. She really did know him better than anyone else. “I spent my entire life thinking things were one way and now I've been told they're another. And there are so many more questions and no answers for them.”

“Do you really want answers?” she asked.

He was surprised at that question. He had said on the TARDIS he had, and he supposed he still did, but there was also a part of him that wanted to let it all go, to concentrate on what he had now and not what had gone on in the past. “I do, but I don't. While I am curious as to why my life and Sherlock's are connected the way they are, part of me wants to let it go and live in the present. But I know Sherlock and the Doctor won't rest until they get answers, and I suppose if they know them I want to know them as well.”

“There are more thoughts rattling around in your head, though, aren't there?” she asked quietly.

“You know, you are very perceptive,” he said, looking down at her. “I don't tell you that often enough.”

“It's because I know you better than anyone else,” she said with a smile, moving her arm so she could put a hand on his chest. She ended up setting it right over his heart. “What else is keeping you awake?”

“I wonder what it might have been like living here, growing up in this time and place with Sherlock and Mycroft and Carlton as my brothers,” he said quietly. “And I wonder about the possibility that I would have met the same fate Carlton did if I had been here, going mad because I was experiencing two lives at once. And then I wonder why Carlton was chosen to stay and I was sent back, and whether whoever brought me could have simply found another family for me.”

“Those are a lot of very heavy thoughts,” she said quietly. “I have some opinions, if you want to hear them.”

“I think it would be preferable to running my own mind around in circles,” he said.

“I think if the four of you had grown up here together you would have been very damaged. Not that you weren't when you got here, but you probably would have been either like Sherlock or Mycroft was when I first encountered them.”

“And what were they like?” he asked.

She was quiet for a few seconds as she gathered her thoughts. “Sherlock was a human robot. He had absolutely no regard for anyone else, didn't care if he hurt or offended you, and was cruel with no real reason to be. He was not a pleasant person.”

“And yet you fancied him,” he pointed out.

“I had blinders on. A lot of women have a mentality that they can change a man, make them better, if only they'll fall in love with them. That's how I looked at him, and that's why I always gave him another chance after he insulted or belittled me. Sometimes having a mindset like that works, but most of the time it doesn't.”

“It certainly worked that way between us,” he said. “I wasn't that different from Sherlock, if you look at my behaviour compared to how you just described him.”

“I suppose it did,” she said with a soft laugh. “While they don't have a romantic relationship, Sherlock changed because of John, because John made it a point to change him. But that was only a few years back. He had to have spent a large portion of his life shutting off his emotions and building up a wall around his heart. He's told me he was quite lonely growing up. I don't think it would have been different if you were there along with Carlton. If anything I think he might have been even more withdrawn and lonely.”

“Why?” he asked curiously.

“Well, this ties into one of your other thoughts. I think the link you and Carlton had would have been strong if you'd both been here. But it would go both ways. He would still know everything you did, but you would also know everything he did. And it would have been beyond what normal identical twins feel. You would still be living each other’s lives at the same time you were living your own. If you could have talked about it and made sense of things it might have been bearable, but you two would have had a bond with each other that neither of you would have had with Sherlock, and he would have been incredibly resentful.”

“I think, if we had both been here, I would have had less freedom than I did in our home universe,” he said. “Even though I was a weapon and I was treated as such, I had some freedom. I think if I had been here and I had known everything that Carlton did I would never have been able to have my own life.”

“I don't think you would have either,” she said. “You two would have been incredibly codependent. Your lives would have revolved around each other and I doubt either of you would have been able to step away from that. It would have been too much of a shock. And there's always the chance if one of you _did_ try and break away the other would resent it and ruin it however he could so that the one who left would have to come back. You never would have had privacy in your mind.”

“I suppose,” he said. “I think if I had been left with another family it would have been worse. I wouldn't have had Carlton nearby to ask questions of, to have someone who understood. I'm fairly sure I would have lost my sanity before I figured out what was going on in my head, just like he did.”

“I could see that being a definite possibility,” she said with a slight nod. 

“I also find myself wondering why Sherlock's family? Why couldn't he have been given to a random family and them simply saying he was adopted, or left on a doorstep in the middle of the night?”

“Maybe there's something that's guiding all of this along,” she replied.

“Like some mysterious hand of fate?” he asked.

“Maybe not fate, but something,” she said, beginning to idly draw shapes on his skin. “I mean, there's a lot that had to happen exactly as it did for all of this to play out the way it did. The first thing was you were brought here. Maybe the Doctor's theory of how you ended up in my bedroom after meeting the Weeping Angel is true, that it sent you here because you'd been here before. But it could have just as easily sent you to the past in your universe. You'd been asleep for three hundred years. It could have sent you back to a time between when you went into cryogenic sleep and when you were woken up. And that's another thing.”

“What is?” he asked, curious to see where her thoughts lead.

“You had to do everything you did in the Eugenics War for you to be exiled from Earth. That in turn led you to being cryogenically frozen along with your crew. And the universe changes James said happened _had_ to happen for Starfleet to go looking for life on the farthest reaches of space and find your ship. And then it had to be Admiral Marcus who decided you had to be the one who woke up.”

“I was the leader of my crew,” he pointed out.

“Could you tell who was who in those cryotubes?” she asked.

“Yes, our faces were visible,” he said. “But I see where you are going with this. Marcus had to know who we were and that I was the one to wake up, and he had to force me into slavery so I started to plot revenge.”

“And you had to become curious about that room no one was allowed to get into, and you had to badger that technician to give you access. If you hadn't done any one of those things you never would have come here. And then there's where you landed. Even if the Weeping Angel sent you back to London it could have sent you back to 1981, which was the year you came here before. It could have sent you to Sherlock's childhood home instead of here. But it sent you to the specific time it sent you to, and it sent you to _this_ bedroom. The night you arrived was the same night Amy and Rory told me about the Doctor. I mean, they had literally just told me five minutes before you got dropped here. So I don't think it's a coincidence. Something wanted you to be here the night I found out about aliens and traveling through time and space.”

He was quiet for a moment. Now that it had been laid out, he could see the clear pattern of something manipulating everyone involved for a certain sequence of events to take place. “I think this actually makes me more troubled. If each of those things had to happen in that specific order, this was no coincidence.”

“No, it wasn't. Especially when you consider I was one of Sherlock's friends and I was one of four people in the world who knew he wasn't dead.”

“Four?” he asked, sounding confused. “I thought there was only you, Sherlock and Mycroft.”

“Oh, I'm almost 100% sure Anthea knew all about it as well. If I was Sherlock's secret keeper she was Mycroft's. He trusts her more than he trusts anyone in the world. He trusts her more than he trusts Sherlock, I think.” She lifted her head up slightly. “I think whatever it is that's doing this wanted you in this specific time and place for a reason. I think the only thing they may not have counted on was you eventually taking over what Sherlock was doing. That's the only reason I can think of that Moriarty found out the truth about you. Somebody wanted everything back under control and they figured the best way to do that was to get Sherlock involved in Moriarty's game again. But it backfired when the Doctor got the Tesselecta involved. Without Moriarty to guide his end of things along it has to wait for something else to happen.”

“I'm worried about what this something else will be,” he said with a sigh as she set her head back down.

“I am too,” she said quietly. “I don't like not knowing whatever this grand scheme is. I want to have a life that isn't dictated by something I don't understand. That's part of the reason I'm not religious. I have faith in people, not in something that is omnipresent and omnipotent.”

“I don't like this much either,” he said quietly. Then he lapsed into silence for a moment. “I have one other thought rattling around in my head. I could clearly see what happened when I was brought here the first time. And I was being held at an angle where I could see Sherlock's mother's face. She knew what the Great Intelligence was. And I wonder if the memory wipe made her forget.”

She lifted her head up again, looking at him intently. “You think she was in on all of this at first,” she said slowly.

He nodded. “I do. And I wonder why her memory was modified along with everyone else's. From what Sherlock said, Carlton started showing symptoms of schizophrenia at a young age, only now we know he wasn't schizophrenic. If she had still known the truth that would have been something she would have realized wasn't a traditional mental illness. But she treated it as though that's what it was.”

She was silent for a few minutes, and he could see she was thinking about things. He waited patiently for her to speak again. “I think this conversation has ensured I'm not going to have an easy time sleeping for a while either,” she said with a sigh when she finally spoke.

“It did help me, though,” he said. “I think I need to call the Doctor and relay all of the things we've just talked about to him. He may have had the same thoughts, but if he hasn't it could put things in perspective.”

“Then maybe it wasn't a bad thing you were thinking too loudly,” she said, giving him a small smile.

“Are you going to be able to go back to sleep?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I'm wide awake now. Why?”

“I don't think I'll be going back to sleep either,” he replied.

“Ah,” she said, shifting slightly so she could move farther up the bed. “So you think if you're awake and I'm awake and we're both going to be awake for a while there are much more interesting things we could be doing than talking, right?”

“You know me quite well,” he said, moving his hand to tuck some of her hair behind her ear.

“I'm going to marry you. You had better believe I know you well,” she said with a wider smile. “I wouldn't have said yes otherwise.”

“I'm glad you know me as well as you do, then,” he murmured.

“I'm glad I do too,” she said softly before leaning in and kissing him. He moved his hand to cup the back of her head for a moment before he rolled them both over so she was on her back. He knew that this was a distraction to his thoughts, but he'd sorted a few of them out and he hoped that would make them easier to bear. For the moment, though, he wanted to lose himself in this time and this place and this woman and let the thoughts sink back into the depths of his mind, and as she pulled him closer he could tell she was in a similar frame of mind, and that was all that mattered to him.


End file.
